5 Signs it’s Time to Change Your Church’s Name

Now I realize, the very name of this post is enough to make people pretty upset. Be assured, this isn’t meant to offend. This is merely meant as a humorous look at why some churches should probably change their name. If you happen to find yourself in one of these situations, don’t worry. I’ve been there too.

When I worked at a church, we changed our name for a few of these reasons. I’ll let you know which ones. Enjoy!

1. You find out your church name is a euphemism for something sexual or drug related.

2. People confuse your church name with another religion.

This was one thing that caused us to change our church name. We were called Faith Temple. Imagine our frustration when we held a 9/11 memorial service and the news reported it: “And the jews at Faith Temple commemorated the event by…” It was definitely time for a name change.

3. Everyone in town attended 20 years ago, but nobody wants to go back.

Another reason we change our name. We’d been through three different pastors and changed styles drastically. But everyone remembered the church they visited twenty years ago. They had no idea what we were like now.

4. It’s named after an unfortunate region or city name.

Boring Seventh Day Adventist Church and Hell Hole Swamp Baptist Church might not be going multi-site in other cities any time soon.

5. The church name doesn’t fit in a tweet.

If you can’t invite people to your church over Twitter because the church name doesn’t fit, you might want to think about renaming.

Those are my reasons churches might want to change their name. What are yours? Share them in a comment below!

If you’re not careful about word order, you might be saying something totally different than you think you are. “Christian Reformed Community” is different from “Reformed Christian Community”. I know they should mean the same thing, but the first sounds Calvinist and the second sounds like former Christians, like “reformed alcoholic” doesn’t mean a Calvanist and an alcoholic it means former alcoholic.